FRANEK (Sabine Franek-Koch)

FRANEK is an artist who works with painting, prints and drawings. Her oeuvre is complemented by photography, film, and documentation. She has taught at Universität der Künste Berlin; Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, the Institute of Design and Fine Art in Lahti; and Bremen’s Hochschule für Künste. With travel and research fellowships, including Djerassi Foundation, USA; Casa de Cultura, Portugal; Künstlerstätte Bleckede, Germany, and Fundación Valparaíso, Spain, she has traveled extensively. In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked in the realm of indigenous culture, in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. In the desert of Nazca (Peru), she assisted the mathematician Maria Reiche in measuring the spirals located there. In the process, she developed the Nazca project, which is accompanied by Super8 films In den Zeichen 1 & 2 (1981). Among the Sicangu Sioux (Lakota) on Rosebud Reservation, she recorded rituals for Bremen’s Übersee-Museum (Lakota Tagebuch, 1983). A component of her Maya project is her work Verzeichnis: “The exploration of the Maya glyphs gave FRANEK the inspiration to expand her study of old signs and to engage with signs from early human history. She listed signs on a 55m long and 40 cm wide paper roll, that later found their place in a protective acrylic glass box. Verzeichnis recalls in its external appearance old scriptural rolls” (Elisabeh Voigtländer). Inspired by the film character of this object, together with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the artist made the video Verzeichnis.